Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images.
American prison. Source: Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images.
On September 9, 2016, the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, prisoners from at least twenty-one states began striking against what they called “modern-day slavery.” The strike stands as one of the largest in U.S. history (figures are difficult to verify and the California prison hunger strike in 2013 involved at least 30,000 people) and several prisoners have lost their lives in this struggle. Prison strikers’ language is not hyperbolic. As Ava DuVernay’s new documentary on the 13th Amendment highlights, the very amendment that abolished slavery and guaranteed the legal emancipation of nearly four million enslaved people also carved out space for the continuation of slavery “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

In 2015, President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a U.S. prison. Since then, he banned the use of solitary confinement in federal juvenile prisons and the Bureau of Prisons recommended ending its contracts with private prisons. Obama has also commuted the sentences of hundreds of nonviolent drug offenders. Yet these changes only affect a small number of people housed in the federal prison system, which itself accounts for less than 10% of the total incarcerated population in the U.S. And while the war on drugs has ruined countless lives, most people in prison are not incarcerated for drug offenses. So Obama’s commutations do not address the main reasons people have been incarcerated; further, commutations shorten their sentence while leaving intact a host of restrictions—including disenfranchisement—faced by people with felony convictions. In a recent presidential election decided by fewer than one million votes, there were over six million voters disenfranchised for felony convictions.

Other aspects of the mass incarceration are not withering so much as transforming. Private prison corporations, which have been visible but small players in the system of mass incarceration, have already moved toward immigration detention, reentry, and electronic monitoring as new sources of carceral revenue. Within hours of the election of Donald Trump, stocks of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group skyrocketed, signaling another ratcheting up of private prisons and their relationship with the federal government. The excitement for bipartisan prison reform inside the beltway has dissipated amidst a modest reform agenda whose biggest focus has been on reducing government spending rather than ameliorating human suffering. These neoliberal cost-benefit analyses have placed more burdens on the backs of prisoners and their loved ones while leaving untouched the basic outlines of mass incarceration. The failures of contemporary prison reform serve as a reminder of the massive human and environmental costs of prisons.

The current prison strike’s struggle to achieve visibility (organizers have alleged a “mainstream-media blackout”) has been a central obstacle since the origins of prison organizing. In light of the dangerous implications of neoliberal prison reform and the marginalization of the current prison strike from the public political sphere, the Prison Abolition Syllabus (modeled after #FergusonSyllabus, #Charlestonsyllabus, #WelfareReformSyllabus and Trump Syllabus 2.0) seeks to contextualize and highlight prison organizing and prison abolitionist efforts from the 13th Amendment’s rearticulation of slavery to current resistance to mass incarceration, solitary confinement, and prison labor exploitation.

Week 1. Theories and Origins of Punishment

Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon and Other Prison Writings (Verso, 1995).
Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015).
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003).
Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton University Press, 2011).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Pantheon, 1977).
Paul Knepper and Anja Johansen, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Glenn Loury, et al., Race, Incarceration, and American Values (MIT Press, 2008).
Manning Marable, “Black Prisons and Punishment in a Racist/Capitalist State,” in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society (Haymarket Books, 2015; 1st edition 1983), 94–115.
Norval Morris and David Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison (Oxford University Press, 1995).
Caleb Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale University Press, 2011).
Week 2. Race, Sex, Labor, and Prisons in the Early Republic

Estelle Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 (University of Michigan Press, 1981).
Adam Jay Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (Yale University Press, 1992).
Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Michele Lise Tarter and Richard Bell, eds., Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America (University of Georgia Press, 2012).
Jen Manion, Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
Rebecca McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941 (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory: Origins of the Penitentiary System (Barnes and Noble Books, 1981).
Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Primary Sources and Multimedia

Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Doubleday, 2008).
Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and their World, Alabama, 1865-1900 (University Press of Virginia, 2000).
Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
Talitha LeFlouria, “‘Under The Sting Of The Lash’: Gendered Violence, Terror, and Resistance in the South’s Convict Camps,” The Journal of African American History 100.3 (Summer 2015), 366–84.
Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (Verso, 1996).
Timothy Gilfoyle, “‘America’s Greatest Criminal Barracks’: The Tombs and the Experience of Criminal Justice in New York City, 1838-1897,” Journal of Urban History 29.5 (July 2003), 525–54.
Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
LaShawn D. Harris, “The ‘Commonwealth of Virginia vs. Virginia Christian’: Southern Black Women, Crime & Punishment in the Progressive Era,” The Journal of Social History 47.4 (Summer 2014), 922–42.
Matthew Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928 (University of South Carolina Press, 1996).
David Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (Free Press, 1996).
Geoff K. Ward, The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Primary Sources and Multimedia

Jeffrey Adler, “Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early Twentieth-Century America,” The Journal of American History 102.1 (2015), 34–46.
Miroslava Chávez-García, States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (University of California Press, 2012).
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (University of Philadelphia, 1899).
Shaun L. Gabbidon, W.E.B. Du Bois on Crime and Justice: Laying the Foundations of Sociological Criminology (Ashgate Publishing, 2007).
Kali Nicole Gross, “African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection,” The Journal of American History 102.1 (2015), 25–33.
Kali Nicole Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 (Duke University Press, 2006).
Kali Nicole Gross, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Kali Nicole Gross and Cheryl D. Hicks, “Introduction—Gendering the Carceral State: African American Women, History, and the Criminal Justice System,” The Journal of African American History 100.3 (Summer 2015), 357–66.
Kelly Lytle Hernández, “Hobos in Heaven: Race, Incarceration, and the Rise of Los Angeles, 1880–1910,” Pacific Historical Review 83.3 (2014), 410–47.
Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
Cheryl D. Hicks, “‘In Danger of Becoming Morally Depraved’: Single Black Women, Working-Class Black Families, and New York State’s Wayward Minor Laws, 1917-1928,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 151.6 (June 2003), 2,077–121.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press, 2010).
Sowande’ Mustakeem, “‘Armed With A Knife In Her Bosom’: Gender, Violence, And The Carceral Consequences Of Rage In The 19th Century,” The Journal of African American History 100.3 (Summer 2015), 385–405.
Cookie Woolner, “‘Woman Slain In Queer Love Brawl’: African American Women, Same-Sex, Desire, And Violence In The Urban North,” The Journal of African American History 100.3 (Summer 2015), 406–27.
Week 5. Anti-Lynching and Prisoner Defense Campaigns

James Acker, Scottsboro and its Legacy: The Cases That Challenged American Legal and Social Justice (Praeger, 2007).
Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Hill and Wang, 2010).
Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Louisiana State University Press, 1979).
Andrew Cornell, Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2016).
Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (University of Illinois, 2013).
Megan Ming Francis, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Christina Heatherton, “University of Radicalism: Ricardo Flores Magon and Leavenworth Penitentiary,” American Quarterly 66.3 (September 2014), 557–81.
Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Antilynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Duke University, 2007).
James W. Messerschmidt, “‘We Must Protect Our Southern Women’: On Whiteness, Masculinities, and Lynching,” in Race, Gender, and Punishment: From Colonialism to the War on Terror, Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin, eds. (Rutgers University Press, 2007), 77–94.
James Miller, Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial (Princeton University Press, 2009).
James Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker, and Eve Rosenhaft, “Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys, 1931-1934,” American Historical Review, 106.2 (2001), 387–430.
Kenyon Zimmer, “Positively Stateless: Marcus Graham, the Ferrereo-Sallitto Case, and the Anarchist Challenges to Race and Deportation,” in The Rising Tide of Color, Moon-Ho Jung, ed. (University of Washington, 2014), 128–58.
Primary Sources and Multimedia

Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (New York University, 2012).
Kathleen Cairns, Hard Time at Tehachapi: California’s First Women’s Prison (University of New Mexico Press, 2009).
Mary Ellen Curtin, “‘Please Hear Our Cries’: The Hidden History of Black Prisoners in America,” in The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration, Deborah McDowell, Claudrena Harold, and Juan Battle, eds. (University of Virginia Press, 2013), 29–44.
Edward J. Escobar, “The Unintended Consequences of the Carceral State: Chicana/o Political Mobilization in Post-World War II America,” Journal of American History 102.1 (2015), 174–84.
Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Kelly Lytle Hernández, MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010).
Volker Janssen, “When the ‘Jungle’ Met the Forest: Public Work, Civil Defense, and Prison Camps in Postwar California,” The Journal of American History 9. 3 (2009), 702–26.
Naomi Murakawa, First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Mira Shimabukuro, Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration (University of Colorado Press, 2015).
Heather Ann Thompson, “Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History Inmates and Guards,” LABOR: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas 8.3 (2011), 15–45.
Primary Sources and Multimedia

The Suyama Project, Digital Archive of Japanese American Resistance to Incarceration.
Week 7. The Civil Rights Movement, Prisoners, and Legal Reform

Robert Chase, “We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” The Journal of American History 102.1 (2015), 73–86.
Zoe Colley, Ain’t Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement (University of Florida, 2013).
Malachi Crawford, Black Muslims and the Law: Civil Liberties from Elijah Muhammad to Muhammad Ali (Lexington Books, 2015).
Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford University Press, 1994).
Malcolm M. Feeley and Edwin L. Rubin, Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America’s Prisons (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
James Jacobs, Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society (University of Chicago Press, 1977).
Toussaint Losier, “‘. . . For Strictly Religious Reasons,’ Cooper v. Pate and the Origins of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 15, 1-2 (2013), 19–38.
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Random House, 1965).
Donna Murch, Living For the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
Primary Sources and Multimedia

Prisoners at Sing Sing Prison, excerpt from “Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters.”
What I Want My Words to Do to You: Voices from a Maximum Security Women’s Prison, directed by Eve Ensler (PBS Home Video, 2004).
Mumia, Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal, directed by Stephen Vittoria (First Run Features, 2013).
Week 14. The Future of Prison Activism

Hadar Aviram, Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment (University of California Press, 2015).
Dan Berger, “Social Movements and Mass Incarceration: What is to be Done?” Souls 15, 1-2 (2013), 3–18.
CR10 Publications Collective, Abolition Now: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2008).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement,” Social Justice Journal, February 23, 2015.
Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2015).
Kelly Lytle Hernández, “Amnesty or Abolition: Felons, Illegals, and the Case for a New Abolition Movement,” Boom: A Journal of California 1.4 (Winter 2011), 54–68.
Keramet Reiter, “The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike: Resistance within the Structural Constraints of a US Supermax Prison,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113.3 (Summer 2014), 579–611.
Julia Sudbury, “Reform or Abolition?: Using Popular Mobilizations to Dismantle the Prison-Industrial Complex,“Criminal Justice Matters 77.1 (2009), 17–19.
Primary Sources and Multimedia

Dan Berger is an assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He is the author of several books including Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. He is the co-author of the forthcoming Rethinking the American Prison Movement. Follow him on Twitter @dnbrgr.

Garrett Felber is a scholar of 20th-century African American history. He earned a PhD in American Culture at the University of Michigan in the American Culture Department. His scholarship has been published in the Journal of African American History, South African Music Studies, and SOULS. He has also contributed to The Guardian, The Marshall Project, and Viewpoint Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @garrett_felber.

Kali Gross is Professor of African American Studies at Wesleyan University. Her research concentrates on black women’s experiences in the United States criminal justice system between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is author of the award-winning book, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910, and the newly released, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America. Follow her on Twitter @KaliGrossPhD.

Elizabeth Hinton is an assistant professor in the Departments of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. A Ford Foundation Fellow, Hinton completed her Ph.D. in United States History from Columbia University in 2013. She is the author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Follow her on Twitter @elizabhinton.

Anyabwile Love is an Assistant Professor at the Community College of Philadelphia. He earned a Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University. He is currently writing a project on John William Coltrane. Follow him on Twitter @AnyabwileLove.